On Tuesday, the 23-story-high system ignited and blasted off from Launch Complex 39A in Florida, the same platform where the Apollo astronauts took off for the moon decades ago. Minutes later, two of the rocket boosters landed safely back on the ground.

This is the first time Elon Musk’s private space company has tried to launch a rocket quite this big.

Falcon Heavy is re-usable, expandable, and cheaper than the competition. But Musk was careful to emphasise that this launch is still just a test.

At least a couple things didn’t go according to plan. Musk’s Tesla Roadster and its dummy driver named Starman overshot their target to enter Mars orbit. And one rocket booster that was supposed to land atop a drone ship ended up barreling into the Atlantic Ocean and scattering shrapnel on the deck, Musk said.

Take a look at what happened when the massive experiment took off from the Kennedy Space Center:

Instead of spending six months hurling towards Mars orbit, the Tesla payload ended up travelling well past Mars, and now it’s cruising in the asteroid belt.

The car’s unplanned, longer solar orbit stretches from the sun to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Two of the three reusable Falcon Heavy boosters landed safely back on Earth after they shot the car-carrying rocket into space.

SpaceX/YouTube

The two side boosters landed in perfect synchronisation at Cape Canaveral. Musk said it was “probably the most exciting thing I’ve ever seen, literally, ever.”

SpaceX/YouTube

But the third core booster didn’t make it to its final destination on a landing pad in the Atlantic Ocean. “Apparently it hit the water at 300 miles an hour and took out two of the engines on the drone ship,” Musk told reporters on Tuesday evening.

Falcon Heavy had a total of 27 rocket engines on those three re-usable boosters.

SpaceX/Flickr

The company first successfully salvaged a booster from its Falcon 9 rocket in March of 2017.